Even at that time Winston had not imagined
that the people had actually committed the crimes
that they were accused of.

4. Old World Destruction

Winston was struggling to think his way backward into the dim period of his early childhood. It was extraordinarily difficult. Beyond the late 'fifties everything faded. Everything had been different then. Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map had been different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called England or Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London.

Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of peace during his childhood, because one of his early memories was of an air raid which appeared to take everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester. It happened when he was eight or nine years old. He did not remember the raid itself, but he did remember his father's hand clutching his own as they hurried down, down, down into someplace deep in the earth, round and round a spiral staircase which rang under his feet and which finally so wearied his legs that he began whimpering and they had to stop and rest. His mother, in her slow, dreamy way, was following a long way behind them. She was carrying his baby sister. Finally they had emerged into a noisy, crowded place which he had realized to be a Tube station.

There were people sitting all over the stone-flagged floor, and other people, packed tightly together, were sitting side by side on a bunk. The old man had on a decent dark suit and a black cloth cap pushed back from very white hair: his face was scarlet and his eyes were blue and full of tears. He reeked of gin. It seemed to breathe out of his skin in place of sweat, and one could have fancied that the tears welling from his eyes were pure gin. But though slightly drunk he was also suffering under some grief that was genuine and unbearable. In his childish way Winston grasped that some terrible thing, something that was beyond forgiveness and could never be remedied, had just happened. Every few minutes the old man kept repeating: "We didn't ought to 'ave trusted 'em. I said so, Ma, didn't I? That's what comes of trusting 'em. I said so all along. We didn't ought to 'ave trusted the buggers." But which 'buggers' they 'didn't ought to have trusted' Winston could not now remember.

In the times after the bomb they revolutionized with force. For several months after there had been confused street fighting in London itself, some of which he remembered vividly. There were great purges in which dissenters and resistors were wiped out. His father disappeared during these rackety, uneasy times. There were periodical panics about air raids and the sheltering in Tube stations ...the piles of rubble everywhere... the unintelligible proclamations posted at street corners... the gangs of youths in shirts all the same colour... the enormous queues outside the bakeries... the intermittent machine-gun fire in the distance.

When he was around twelve his mother disappeared. It was during the time when they were living in a room and when there was never enough to eat. He remembered spending long afternoons with other boys in scrounging round dust bins and rubbish heaps and also in waiting for the passing of trucks which traveled over a certain route and were known to carry cattle feed which sometimes split a few fragments of oil cake. After his father disappeared his mother seemed to become completely spirit less. It was evident even to Winston that she was waiting for something that she knew must happen. For hours at a time she would sit on the bed, nursing his young sister, a tiny, ailing, very silent child of two or three. Very occasionally she would take Winston in her arms and press him against her for a long time without saying anything. He was aware, in spite of his youthfulness and selfishness, that this was somehow connected with the never-mentioned thing that was about to happen.

...When he came back after several hours his mother had disappeared. This was already becoming normal at that time. It was possible that she had been sent to a forced-labour camp. As for his sister, she might have been removed, like Winston himself, to one of the colonies for homeless children (Reclamation Centres, they were called) which had grown up as a result of the civil war; or simply left somewhere to die.

The sixties were the period of the great purges in which the original leaders of the Revolution were wiped out once and for all. By 1970 none of them was left, except BIG BROTHER himself. All the rest had by that time been exposed as traitors and counter-revolutionaries. Goldstein had fled and was hiding no one knew where, and of the others, a few had simply disappeared, while the majority had been executed after spectacular public trials at which they made confession of their crimes. ...They had confessed to intelligence with the enemy (at that date, too, the enemy was Eurasia), embezzlement of public funds, the murder of various trusted Party members, intrigues against the leadership of BIG BROTHER which had started long before the Revolution happened, and acts of sabotage causing the death of hundreds of thousands of people. ...Even at that time Winston had not imagined that the people who were wiped out in the purges had actually committed the crimes that they were accused of.